James Jean is an Artist with quite the imagination. His creations include a lot of graphic yet colorful material. A description of his art can vary from anywhere between breath taking beautiful, interesting, disturbing or terrifying. But yet, even though the most disturbing of his pieces can draw you in. I would say that James’s art is directed towards a certain type of audience; someone who can see the beauty in something that at first, can come off as confusing. The piece Homeopathic drew me in the second I saw it, this piece has a lot to say with a lot of things going. Homeopathic is terrifying yet interesting while also innocent.
At first when looking at this piece, you think dark and depressing. Also a lot of questions came to mind. These questions consisted of; Why is there a child laying on the teacher’s desk while someone is holding their heart? What is that creature floating outside of the window? Who is that person wearing a hood in the back? Why is there a cat in the back left corner? I then realized that I didn’t even know what the name of this piece meant. This then led me to looking up the definition of Homeopathic, which I then learned comes from the term Homeopathy. The definition of Homeopathy is “Homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine created in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann based on his doctrine of like cures like (similia similibus curentur), a claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people. Large-scale studies have found homeopathic preparations to be no more effective than a placebo, suggesting that positive feelings after taking homeopathic medicines are due to the placebo effect and normal recovery from illness. Homeopathy is what is known as a pseudoscience, a belief that is incorrectly presented as scientific and is ineffective for treating any condition.” (en.wikipedia.org) Or an easier understanding is that is that is basically the treatment of disease by doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease. Most doctors would consider Homeopathy techniques to be nonsense or a sham. Homeopathy is looked down on by many. It is almost considered torture by the fact that it is the process of basically injecting disease into one’s body in some forms.
With all that being said, that is where I’m guessing James got the idea to make this piece into an Evil scientist type of scene. This would also answer my question of “Why is there a child laying on the teacher’s desk while someone is holding their heart?” As the ‘doctor’ which I would assume to be some sort of evil doctor, is attempting to cure this child of whatever disease they might have using Homeopathy remedies. This then made me come to an assumption of what if the children sitting at their desks are waiting in some sort of line, waiting their turn to have the ‘doctor’ look at them and cure them with his Homeopathy remedies? As all of the children look like they have something wrong with them. The one child in the front left is sitting with his head down and his hands on his head like he is in pain with what looks like vomit spread out across his desk. While the girl sitting next to him is sitting with her head back and with her eyes closed like she is also in pain. The boy sitting next to that girl has his arms stretched out across his desk as if he is stressed or angry. The girl in front of that boy has some type of googles on with her hands in front of her which makes me assume that she is probably blind. Also the boy in front of the kid with his head down looks like he is crazed or hyperactive.
Next I decided to look up what cats symbolize in art which would answer my question of “Why is there a cat in the back left corner?” I then came across the definition of “As an ancient symbolic Celtic animal, the cat represents the guardian of the Otherworld (or Underworld, depending which texts you read from various regions). Stoic, silent and mysterious, cats fit the bill of Otherworld guardians quite well. They keep the secrets of the Otherworld eternally to themselves, as they gaze with guile upon a world that does not see or understand the depth of their knowledge.” (whats-your-sign.com) This would explain why there is a cat watching over everything, just sitting there in the corner peacefully, which is ironic because of everything that is happening around the cat, the cat is just sitting there watching the craziness of this ‘underworld’ where there are many acts of evil and crazy going on. According to the definition cats are known for being guardians of underworlds. The idea of this picture being in a setting of an underworld then made me come to realize that the giant, scary looking, floating object with multiple heads is clearly not an object from the the real world which assured me that this piece is meant to be considered a underworld setting type of piece. This also answers my question of ‘What is that creature floating outside of the window?’ This then made me come back to my theory of the evil homeopathy doctor; This doctor must be some evil underworld doctor who is using incorrect homeopathy remedies on these children, because I was also looking up what homeopathy doctors do when they practice, and nothing came up about doctors doing anything surgical like taking about a patient’s heart like the ‘doctor’ is in this piece. This then led me to my last question which was “Who is that person wearing a hood in the back.” I really couldn’t think of any explanation for this, as this is quite odd. But it does go along with the whole underworld idea though, so I looked up what does people wearing a hood in art symbolize? It showed that usually when artist put people wearing hoods in the back of there paintings it is to help create the idea of suspicion and mystery. Also it is used to symbolize power by the fact that they are creating the idea of that suspicion and mystery, therefore it gives off the idea that they know something that we don’t know. So my theory for this mysterious guy with the hood in the back is that he knows exactly what is going on in this room, which makes him powerful because he knows something that we don’t know when first looking at the piece. He knows that there is an evil doctor using weird, torturous, homeopathy remedies on children and that all the children are messed up or have something wrong with them, but he is just going to sit there mysteriously, watching, just like the cat.
This piece is great. James Jean can say a lot in one picture with all the many different things that are going on. He can also make something that seems so ugly, be so beautiful. It takes a great artist to be able to pull off such an illusion. It has so much mystery to it. I think that an artist who can pull that off in their pieces is extremely talented. Even though this piece is quite odd, it really drew me in, and made me really want to learn more about what was actually going on in this picture.